Re: [Pharo-dev] Why Smalltalk is not popular?

[btc]

hi kilon,  Thanks for your words.  I particularly like them since you've come recently to Smalltalk after a number of other languages. There is some interesting discussion of this topic at [1] which indicate a predominance of non-technical issues and technical issues that don't apply today. Paul Grahams "Blub Paradox" [2] explains why popular is not always best. Finally, I'd like to get an update on this from this Gartner [3].. [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsSmalltalkDead [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html   (for the time constrained search down the page for "Blub") [3] http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_driver/2008/10/09/remember-smalltalk/ cheers -ben kilon alios wrote: frankly I find the community here, extremely friendly , well motivated, reasonable and humble. And I dont let a couple of incidents per year change my mind of what happens here on a daily basis.  Smalltalk is unpopular because it never had a big company behind it or a good marketing strategy. 99% of people out there, had, have and will have no clue what smalltalk is all about.  You want to talk about ObjC ? fine . Lets be honest , objc was like 42th most popular language in TIOBE and now is like 3rd. Why ? because iOS. Thats all, not because of quality of the language , not because it has super friendly community , not because users saw the light.   The only thing that ObjC shares with smalltalk is message passing. Does that make ObjC part of the family , eh , no. Unless you are prepared to let tons other languages and IDEs join you, but then you still wont have a family but a nation. And ObjC is a seriously ugly language. Its still no C++ , _javascript_ , Perl or PHP, but its ugly. Smalltalk is gorgeous.  Also dont put too much emphasis on popularity. Java library is super popular and many of its libraries are a big pile of mess. Its quantity vs quality. C++ is on the same boat. Popularity gives you mainly quantity.     My advice is don't be humble, be proud of your work and what you have accomplished with Pharo and your individual project. And if sometimes things go south , remember its much better to be passionate than being dull. Its all part of being human. Keep an open mind, and keep walking , one step at a time. On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 5:40 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote: On 12 Feb 2014, at 14:54, askoh <as...@askoh.com> wrote: > The recent arguments in Smalltalk made me have an Eureka moment on why > Smalltalk is not popular. Smalltalk attracts brilliant people. But these > brilliant people scare others away. Instead of Showing How, they Show Off. > Instead of being inclusive, they are picky. Instead of discussing, they > fight. > > So, Smalltalkers, please be humble, friendly and pacific. Show How. Invite > anyone interested to join. And let's talk normally. I agree, of course. (With the second paragraph, less with the first: these discussion happen everywhere, ever read emails by Linus Torvalds ?) -- But I had an epiphany today, based on this discussion of what is the definition of Smalltalk. I hereby declare that we are the _third_ most popular language (family) in use today ! Based on this very reputable (ahem) index:   http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html I really think that in a broad definition of Smalltalk, Objective-C is part of the family. According to the first line of   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. And messaging is at the core of Smalltalk. It also has a similar class based object model, is late bound in almost everything and has some reflective capabilities. There are even a couple of projects mixing the two explicitly. Reserve a bigger venue for the next ESUG ! Sven PS: We've had these discussions before on various occasions: it is really hard to come up with a definition of what is Smalltalk, or even a good list of what is so special about it - there really is a elusive, hard to define aspect to it. > All the best, > Aik-Siong Koh > > > > -- > View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Why-Smalltalk-is-not-popular-tp4743009.html > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >